The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  ‘Aren’t you prevented from being here? All the embassy staff have been forbidden to travel to the coast. Didn’t your organisation put out some kind of directive?’

  She found it difficult to read the woman’s tone – inviting yet wary, seemingly casual but with a sharp note buried within. ‘They did, but I got special dispensation,’ she added, ‘because my family live here.’

  ‘You look a little young to be a doctor.’

  She laughed. ‘Everyone says that.’

  She was close enough now to see the monkeys’ faces, how their expressions differed. One had a sage look. Another’s forehead was knit together, as if with worry. Its face was narrow, fringed by orange bristles, like an eighteenth-century gentlemen’s sideburns. Its fur was blue-grey, luminous.

  ‘So are you here from the States?’

  ‘Well, yes and no. I did my doctorate on these ruins. I’m Margaux, by the way.’ She slid from the fence. This caused apprehension in the monkeys, who darted glances from the woman to her. ‘I’ll give you my number. We can go out for a drink. It’s not so easy to hang out on your own as a lone woman in this town.’

  She absorbed that Margaux’s invitation came wrapped in self-interest. But she could not help feeling grateful; she might need a friend, someone outside the house.

  Margaux said she would take her on a tour of the ruins. They walked under the tall figs, their trunks gleaming in the afternoon light. Black-breasted starlings and green barbets perched in the trees’ plate-shaped leaves.

  ‘Watch your step,’ Margaux cautioned. ‘There are stones everywhere.’ Most of the city was rubble now, apart from two crumbling archways, once the entrances to the sultan’s palace, Margaux said.

  ‘Who lived here?’

  Margaux stopped at the threshold to a structure, no more than her height. They stood in the shell of what once might have been a doorway. ‘That’s the mystery. No one is quite sure. It was a kind of secret city. No one knew about it, apart from the residents. The Portuguese built Moholo and Kilindoni and had their main fort only ten kilometres way, but they had no idea it existed.’

  She tried to take the measure of the city. The ruins were around two kilometres inland, she guessed – close enough that the ocean appeared as a blue slice in the distance. She had been to the ruined cities of the Maya and Aztec in Mexico and Guatemala. The air of imperial grandeur, and behind it, of cruelty, was absent here, with its quiet, draping lianas and wide shaded avenues. Even the monkeys seemed to revere the place. They were less antic than at the Dhow House.

  ‘So it wasn’t a trading post?’

  ‘It was, but the sea was probably further away then, up to ten kilometres even, so they would have unloaded the boats and walked everything through the forest. Siri – its name means secret,’ Margaux said. ‘It was abandoned around 1650. Nobody knows why.’

  ‘Is that what you are trying to find out?’

  ‘In part. Archaeologists are not mystery-solvers, although you’d be excused from thinking that depending on how many Discovery Channel documentaries you’ve watched.’

  ‘The ruins are not as ghostly as they are in Mexico.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t practice wholesale human sacrifice here. So that helps keep the ghost count down. As ruins go, they’re pretty friendly. Although now and then when I’m here in the early morning or at sundown I get a sense I’m being watched.’

  ‘By who?’

  Margaux shrugged. ‘Like I said, it’s a feeling. It’s not real.’

  It was five o’clock. The light had thickened. She felt the tug of evening. A breeze appeared from nowhere – certainly not from the direction of the ocean. They drew to a halt underneath a tree and looked out to sea, just visible beyond the palm trees that fringed the ruins. The cloud had cleared, revealing a horizon broken by breakers folding over a distant reef.

  ‘Here’s my card.’ Margaux presented her with a damp rectangle. ‘Give me a call anytime. We can hang out.’

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a card but I’ll text you.’

  ‘Great,’ Margaux said, although there was no particular energy in her voice. Rather she sounded languid, almost sleepy. ‘We’ll have a blast.’

  By the time she returned the electricity was off, casting the house in solemn twilight.

  Julia greeted her at the door. ‘We’ve run out of diesel for the generator. We’ll have to do with candles.’

  Julia looked exhausted. Bahari ya Manda was only an hour away, but the road was bad, and traffic could clog the city so much so that travellers regularly missed their flights from the airport even if they left three hours early. This was one of the nuggets of information she’d gleaned from her conversation that afternoon with Margaux. ‘The roadblocks have made it worse,’ Margaux had said, her face sheathed in a pool of shade thrown by her wide-brimmed hat. ‘A trip to the supermarket is a four-hour affair now.’

  Julia made them each a gin and tonic. From the patio grounds came the intermittent screech of a bush baby. ‘Well, cheers.’ Julia lifted her glass. ‘I always need a drink after the supermarket trip.’

  ‘Where is Bill?’

  ‘He’s away on business.’ Julia’s eyes had turned olive in the evening. She fixed her with a frank look. ‘He’s having to spend a lot of time in the city because of the banks.’

  ‘Which banks?’

  ‘His bank, Pan-African – well, his money is mostly offshore – this is the local bank. It’s been seized by the government.’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything in the news.’

  Julia laughed. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t. It’s not like in England, a free press, journalistic standards. They’ve got that very much under control here. It’s being kept quiet.’

  ‘What’s the issue?’

  ‘Fraud. Insider dealing, supposedly, but that’s a set-up. The Central Bank has their eye on the money so they’ve concocted the story. They’ve frozen the assets of a million citizens.’

  ‘Can that really be true?’

  Julia’s head rotated stiffly. ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘No, it’s just in England there’d be a riot, or a national outcry at least.’

  ‘But this is not England. Do you think there’s a financial services authority to guarantee your deposit? Do you know that so-called politicians have nearly bankrupted the national airline to line their own pockets?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is there a substantial amount of money at stake?’

  ‘Not in pounds sterling. But here, yes, a small fortune.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Julia shrugged. ‘Fortunately our necks aren’t on the line. We’ll have to raid the Guernsey account for a while, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s not so bad then,’ she said.

  Julia gave her a look she could only describe as suspicious. ‘This country is becoming ungovernable.’

  She thought of the slim folder Anthony had pressed into her hand. It had contained printouts of bank account statements and tax declarations, proof of non-domicile status. There was nothing irregular, he’d said. But she could remember seeing nothing about Pan-African bank. She did remember the file informed her that twenty years before Bill had set up one of the country’s low-cost airlines. What was it called? Zoom, Zip, something like that. She’d had only ten minutes to scan the contents. She was not allowed to take a copy.

  The fridge stuttered on. The electricity was back. She and Julia floated around the living room, snuffing out the candles, which gave small exhausted hisses as they were extinguished.

  Julia’s phone rang. She walked into the living room. She spoke for only a few seconds, then returned. ‘You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Rebecca? Bill rang, he needs me to go up to Moholo. I’ve made a prawn curry for you and left it in the fridge.’

  ‘Thank you, you didn’t have to.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do. You’ll have to hold the fort tonight. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Not at all. I need
some time on my own, in fact.’

  ‘I know you do. I can imagine you’re not used to this –’ Julia swept her hand around the empty dining room – ‘milling about.’

  Alone in the house that night she heard many sounds normally masked by the presence of people; the mechanical chirr of the slender-tailed nightjar, the low scoping cry of an owl, half-strangled sounds of alarm she could not identify.

  She awoke – how much later she could not say – and sat up with a jolt to a crisp gunshot sound. She listened intently for a few minutes before she was sure it was only a shutter snapping against its frame, somewhere down the long corridor of the house’s second storey. The house swallowed the wind and funnelled it to the back. The house was an amphitheatre, every sound magnified by its wall-less mouth, open to the sea.

  She stood. She didn’t know where she was going, she didn’t care. She had no talent for ambivalence, for inhabiting this in-between place. She had spent all her life on the edge of accomplishment, of finality. She had no talent anymore for process.

  She started walking down the long passageway, lined by louvred windows on one side and nut-brown wood on the other. It led to the master bedroom where her uncle and aunt slept. They must have come home at some point before the midnight curfew. At its turn, on an L-shaped bend, was Storm’s room. In the strip of light visible under the door shadows flitted back and forth.

  She returned to her room quickly and had nearly closed the door behind her when another opened with a crack. She leaned back into the shadows.

  Two bodies emerged. Through the crack in her door she saw them, in the dim corridor as they serpentined down the spiral staircase. When their outlines had disappeared down the stairs she went to stand at the top step.

  She could see only a rectangular piece of the living room. In view was the top of Storm’s head. Evan – she knew it was him from his voice – had walked away. She heard the fridge open and shut. Storm sat on the white sofa, his back towards the stairs. A hand appeared and worked its way through Storm’s hair. It lingered on the crown of his head. Storm’s paler hand clasped it, arrested its progress.

  She stumbled backwards, hitting her heel on the wrought iron balustrade. She had to breathe in sharply to avoid crying out.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I heard something.’

  Then the padding of feet, coming to the stairs, mounting them, feet that were used to owning the house and the night.

  She flung herself into bed. She darted out her hand and drew the mosquito net closed. A crack of light appeared in the door. Then the door shut.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she heard Storm say to Evan outside her door, the only sound now the lean palm trees battering their heads against the house. ‘They’re all asleep.’

  II

  BLACK-BELLIED BUSTARD

  A tall, ginger-haired man was coming towards her, striding fast.

  ‘You alright?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s 44 degrees in the shade. It gets to you here.’ He put a hand on her elbow. ‘You look like you’re about to swoon.’

  ‘Swoon.’ Silver stars sparked and died in her eyes. ‘I haven’t heard that word in a hundred years.’

  ‘Well, you look old, but not that old. What are you doing out here anyway?’

  She had walked to the edge of the compound to escape camp, its disinfectant smell, the tinny radio that sang with local pop-songs, always, from the nursing station, the scabbed knees of the patients, the issues of the Economist and Prospect on her desk and which she had read so many times their edges had curled.

  ‘Here.’ The man held out a bottle of Gatorade.

  ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘Alabama, probably, courtesy of the UN.’ The man’s face carved itself into a dismissive grimace. ‘You got to hand it to the UN, it sure knows how to cart bottled drinks around the globe. I wonder what the carbon footprint of this one is.’

  His words didn’t quite cohere in her mind. She drank it in one go, its sickly lime slipping down her throat. ‘I’m out of practice,’ she said. ‘The heat,’ she added, for measure.

  ‘I heard you were in Helmand. Weren’t you in Iraq too?’

  ‘News travels fast.’ Andy, that was his name. It came to her. They had been introduced briefly that morning. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s probably hotter here.’

  ‘I’ve been in England too long.’

  ‘I know, I try to spend six months in the place, max. Long enough to file a tax return, short enough not to be corrupted by money and house prices.’

  She had to smile. There were always characters like this, everywhere she worked – thin, ironic men who survived on a diet of sardonic quips and servitude.

  The field hospitals were always the same, too, remote colonies, advance parties sent to the moon. A generator, a water filtration unit, a backup generator. Transparent plastic boxes full of documents stacked high and forming a maze in the logistics tent like an art installation in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. These were full of procurement orders, Hilux truck manuals, health and safety procedures.

  Andy disappeared. The sun was levering towards the earth, just beyond the accommodation tents. She took an inventory of this new home. All present and correct: generator, back-up generator; refrigerated Portakabin where freezers for the blood and plasma stock were kept; a much smaller rectangle where the food freezers hummed. The triage tent, ICU, recovery bay, processing tent, staff compound. It was a functional version of the travelling circuses that used to cluster in the summer near their house just off Clapham Common. Here, the circus animals were Giacometti copies of their tiger and elephant cousins: scrawny goats which tottered around the tents and the donkeys, and the camels floating regally on the outskirts of camp like a bored imperial guard.

  She had arrived at Gariseb in early February, just after the hottest time of year had passed. With summer – December and January – came the Jilal, the season of no rain. The heat became more intense with each day until it could not be withstood. She shied away from the sun, fleeing to the scrawny shade offered by the three haggard acacias. The spindled trees, the dull ochre hills and their copper ridges cooked in convection waves. She hadn’t thought such heat possible, apart from furnaces, or the epicentre of a solar flare.

  The high plain on which Gariseb sat was surrounded by green knuckle-shaped mountains and stately equatorial skies. The camp straddled a border in the desert, a straight line as arbitrary as any drawn by an imperium. Across these invisible boundaries famished people materialised daily. They appeared first as dark question marks flanked by goats and pitted camels, or alone, burdened only by the hump of what they could carry on their backs.

  The wounded were transmitted to the hospital in pickups. The camp had a trio of dingy tents, shaky prefab lozenges that housed the camp office, the satellite phone, the one and only computer. There was no mobile signal, not even a local radio station. No news reached them or would, she knew, other than the BBC World Service, which they could listen to on the satellite Internet connection, and occasional telephone calls to the capital city. Emails came once a day in a consolidated block via satellite phone.

  For the first two weeks at Gariseb she dreamt of helicopters; the angry angel of the American Black Hawks or the ashen UN beasts of burden, plucking out the souls who made the mistake of staying too late. She couldn’t bear to fly in helicopters. It was the way they came down. She’d seen it, more than once. They dropped from the sky like stones.

  The battlefield was different here. It was mobile, a fluid stain in the empty quadrant of the south of the country. Her previous postings had been further from the fighting, and an army, British or American, had been either on site or nearby. In Gariseb they had no backup; the British army base was almost five hundred kilometres away. The violence from which the casualties were envoys could easily reach out and engulf them. Even as they ate their
lunch of goat or camel in lime and chilli she would keep an eye on the door of the mess tent, expecting the snouts of AKs to appear at any moment. At night she slept fully clothed, a full army-issue Osprey water bottle beside her bed in case she had to flee into the desert.

  It was two months before she acclimatised. In the afternoons, when the heat was at its peak, she would stand in the spiky shadow thrown by an Acacia mellifera, the sweet-thorn tree. The ground was pitted with tracks – the tiny Vs of dik-diks, the unmistakeable tyre tread of a puff adder, hopefully now far away. The fissure valleys that surrounded camp had been cut by rivers, long dried up. She imagined lions lurking behind the ridge, watching her.

  ‘Don’t even try to understand this situation,’ Andy told her on one of those nights when they both stood outside, waiting for the cool of evening to offer respite. ‘You’ll get nowhere.’

  She understood well enough. She had the advantage of a specialist weekend seminar, held in a village whose name she was sworn not to repeat, located in one of the flat minor shires north-west of London. There she had sat in a Chequers-like mansion surrounded by people like her, plucked ripe on the professional tree, who two weeks later would pitch up in Manila or Lahore or Erbil, all of them looking wistfully out the window, already nostalgic for the moral certainties, forty kinds of yoghurt and imported sauvignon blanc of home.

  There, experts informed her that Gariseb was located in a blasted vector of semi-arid scrubland, seasonally desertified, between four countries. To the north was a stable country of water and vine-choked terrazas. To the north-west, a newly formed nation that had split from its larger cousin, and was busy prospecting for oil. To the east was a country that had imploded, ungovernable, a ‘failed state’, a ‘haven for international terrorism’ in US State Department-speak.

  In the failed state/haven, aid workers were taken as spies and informants and were at risk of being shot on sight. To the west, in the newly formed country, aid was still vital to the project of nation-building, and welcome. But there, in the last two months, old rivalries between the major ethic groups of the country, the Bora and the Nisa, had erupted. Pockets of random, non-state violence – a cattle raid here, a shoot-up there about profits made from a palm wine shebeen – had left hundreds of young men dead.